Twilight (2 page)

The drive was short, the walk inside routine. But the sea of children’s faces made him tense. Eyes bright, cheeks flushed and plump beside their smiles, life and energy so thick he could feel it … and yet so precariously poised on the edge of tragedy. One wrong step, one minute too few …

He grabbed Rocky, the wooden-headed fireman puppet, and fixed the lever that worked its mouth firmly in his palm. But he kept the puppet still at his side as he stepped around the side of the theater. “Good morning, kids!”

“Good morning, Spanner!” They knew him from the last trip, maybe remembered his name came from the fireman’s tool, the spanner wrench. If he could just know they would remember the message behind his tricks.

“Say hello to Rocky, kids.” He held up the puppet.

“Hi, Rocky!”

“Hey, Rocky, tell us a joke.” That from a husky boy near the back.

Cal thought fast. He’d already told every firefighter changing a light bulb joke he knew. He moved the puppet’s mouth. “Did you hear about the monastery that sold flowers to pay for a new chapel?”

“No!” The childish voices struggled to outdo one another.

Cal made Rocky bob his head up and down. “Yep. But the flower seller in the village didn’t like the competition. He told those monastery fellows to cut it out. Did they listen?”

“No!” The children collapsed in giggles. Cal loved that part.

“You’re right!” Rocky shouted, clacking his wooden legs that dangled over Cal’s arm. “They kept selling flowers. So that flower seller brought in the big gun, Hugh McHugh.” Cal pulled the puppet back to face him and kept his mouth almost still as the puppet pleaded, “I can’t tell this part, Spanner. You tell it.”

Cal made his own voice ominous. “All right, Rocky. If you insist.” He looked over the young faces, waved his hand, fingers splayed. “Hugh McHugh stomped up to the monastery. Those little friars heard every step—boom, boom, boom. They trembled behind the door, then jumped back with each thump of his fist. The door flew open, and Hugh said, ‘No more selling flowers!’ Did the friars obey?”

The answers were mixed. Some defiant children shouted no, others called yes. Cal held his white-gloved hand in the air. “Yes, they stopped, and do you know why?”

Quiet now.

“Because Hugh and only Hugh can prevent florist friars.”

The teachers around the gym rolled their eyes and laughed. Half the children laughed, and half leaned to a friend to get the explanation. Cal didn’t wait. His reason for coming was fire safety, and he went right into his spiel.

After the school show he went back to the station, changed and washed up, then went home, more drained than he should be. It hadn’t been that full a day: just paper work, code inspections, and one show. But seeing all those trusting faces, the innocence, little limbs, little minds … He dropped into his recliner. At the third ring of his phone, Cal picked up the receiver.

“Is this Cal?”

He grimaced. “Yeah, Ray. I’m the only one here, remember?” He tossed down the evening paper and popped the tab of his Coke. Its sweet effervescence took the bite from his mood.

“I got a job.”

Of course. Ray only used the phone when he’d picked up an odd job from his newspaper ad. If Cal hung his head out the window, he’d see Ray standing in the garage apartment out back. Ray could have easily run up the outside stairs and told Cal in person, but he always informed him by phone.

“That’s great.”

It was great. At thirty-something, and balancing his lack on the smarts scale with his substantial strength, Ray took his work seriously and got top billing in the odd-job column. On the side, he helped his aunts, Mildred and Cissy, keep up the old country estate that Cal also called home. For that he got the garage apartment gratuitously. As the sole renter, Cal occupied the attic. Mildred and Cissy knocked around in the other two stories of the house in which they’d been born. Only the cellar was uninhabited, at least by humans.

“Yep,” Ray said. “But I need your help.”

That also was a given. Ray only called when he needed help. “Your employer will help in any way you need, Ray.”

“She can’t.”

This was going downhill. “Why not?”

“She’s not strong enough.”

Cal hitched the recliner back until the footrest leapt out. “What’s the job?”

“I gotta move a couch. It’s a sofa sleeper.”

“Move it where?”

“Downstairs. Around a corner.”

He was getting the picture. “When?”

“Tonight. Now.”

Cal pictured Ray’s expression, the urgency in his normally bland face. Ray’s jobs were the highpoint of his life, his way of saying he might not be much, but someone needed him. And that usually meant Ray needed Cal. What were friends for?

Cal massaged the kinks from his neck, swigged the Coke, and stood. “Okay.” How exactly he’d become Ray’s sidekick he couldn’t say—probably no more than proximity and acquiescence. Cal couldn’t turn him down, and that went a long way with Ray, who’d had enough rejection growing up.

The drive into town took longer than it would have if Ray had not insisted on reading the directions while he drove. Cal would have known the block and street by instinct, but Ray wouldn’t let Cal near the strip of napkin he’d written the address on. This was his gig.

Ray’s hammy shoulders hunched over the wheel with the paper trapped in the space between stem and circle. Every now and then he squinted his ruddy face at the hieroglyphics scribbled on the corner, and Cal couldn’t tell from his angle if he could still see the road. Twice he sat on his hands to keep from grabbing the wheel as the edge of the pavement wobbled the tires.

Driving was Ray’s most sensitive spot, maybe because it had taken him six tries to get his license. Cal guessed he’d run through all the driving testers and no one wanted to get in with him again, so they passed him. Now only Cal risked the passenger seat. But hey, if he hadn’t wiped himself out yet, Ray wasn’t likely to either.

After one final miscue, they pulled up in front of a blue-shingled house and climbed out of Ray’s junker. Cal knew the street, but he hadn’t been down this way in a while. The house was better kept than the ones flanking it. The paint looked fresh, and though the structure had the typical sagging of age and weather, there was an innate charm to the place. But then, he was a sop for old houses. More character than new. Just like people. What memories did those old walls hold?

Ray lumbered up the steps and rang the bell. Cal followed but stopped in his tracks when the door opened. She stood dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, her straight, brown hair hanging past her shoulders. She still had the melting brown eyes that reminded him of a spaniel pup. It was Laurie, pronounced “Lawrie.”

She had been quick to correct him when they first met, but he’d made a point of mispronouncing it to keep her attention. He’d kept it, too, from the very start when she joined the Montrose High junior class his senior year. He hadn’t needed to try so hard for her attention when she returned from college seven years ago, the summer her grandmother died. It was that summer that leapt to his mind acutely as they stood now without speaking.

What had been a boyhood crush had become, as his friend Reggie would put it, one of life’s defining moments. He ached inside at the memory—and hoped it didn’t show.

“Hello, Cal,” Laurie murmured.

Rubbing his chin, Ray turned with a true “golly” grin.

Cal shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. What was it his mother used to say? Coincidence was God’s way of remaining anonymous? It wouldn’t be the first time he was the butt of some supernatural joke. “When Ray said he had a job, I hardly expected to find you.” And in no way could he connect her to this old madam of a house. She hated anything old enough to have the price tags removed.

“Are you helping him move my couch?” She pushed open the door and stepped out.

“Did you think he’d move it alone?” Cal’s knees felt weak.

“I guess not.” She finger combed the hair back over her crown. “Come on in.”

They followed her inside. The wooden floor of the entry and living room was the kind of tight tongue and groove that you wanted to slide on with stocking feet, though its finish was worn dull. Nothing broke its plane except a tired wing chair in the corner with a floor lamp beside it. Either she hadn’t been there long or she was living a Spartan existence.

“I’ll get you something cold.” Laur ie disappeared into the kitchen.

Cal tensed. If she brought him a beer … He hooked an eyebrow up at Ray. Would he say something like “Cal’s not supposed to have that”? Swallowing a bitter taste, he gave the living room a quick scan.

The interior had not received the cosmetic boost of fresh paint the exterior had been given, and the absence of furniture accented the cracks in the walls. Ray could make quick work of that and slap on a coat of paint, but Cal didn’t say so. That was Ray’s call, though it suddenly felt personal. He’d have to be careful not to ruffle Ray’s feathers. The last time he’d overstepped his assistant role, Mildred had cold-shouldered him for weeks.

At the foot of the stairs, Cal noticed a junior-sized baseball glove. He didn’t want to think what that meant. But when Laurie emerged and handed him, luckily, a can of Coke, he noted the lack of a ring, though her fingers were as long and slender as he remembered. “Thanks.” He took a swig and followed Ray as she headed upstairs, taking the glove with her.

At the first doorway, she tossed it onto a twin bed with a sports comforter. A pair of trophies perched on the windowsill, and in the corner a stuffed bear wearing a Padres hat. The next room sported only a pink bed and a dollhouse under the window. Two, Cal counted, and they weren’t even down the hall yet.

Laurie stopped at the next door and waved her arm inside. Cal halted at the faint but familiar odor of clay. It must be her studio, and when he glanced inside, he confirmed it. Identifying the slip bucket and the wheel in the corner, he had a sudden attack of nostalgia, remembering a ganglier Laurie kicking the concrete wheel at the bottom, then attaching elbows to ribs for support as she cupped her hands over the mound of clay spinning between them. Little by little, working her hands upward, she’d dig in her thumbs until a gaping mouth appeared, then work the walls thinner with an imperceptible tightening of the fingers and thumbs.

Laurie led Ray to the blue couch along the wall, a Flexsteel sleeper. Well built. Probably lots of steel. She said it came with the house, and Cal guessed the previous owners hadn’t wanted to move it down the stairs. Hanging his head out the door, he eyed the turn of the banister and knew why. He handed his Coke back to Laurie and told Ray, “I’ll go first and be the brains.”

Normally he’d have let Ray take the downward slope and the weight that went with it, but there was no telling what Ray would do with the turn, and if his driving was any indication, Cal was determined to be at the wheel. Ray grinned, hefting his end before Cal could find a fingerhold. Bending both knees, Cal lifted the other end and backed out the door. “We’ll have to raise it over the railing at the turn.”

By Ray’s grunt, Cal supposed he understood. As Laurie squeezed by to direct them, he smelled her. Giorgio, of course. The years flew in reverse as he started after her like a dog at heel, tugging the couch and Ray along. They made it to the turn with no trouble, and he braced his legs as he adjusted his hold. “Going up.”

Ray hoisted his end so swiftly, Cal almost tumbled down the stairs, but he caught his hip on the corner post. It shifted dangerously, and he realized the whole banister could use shoring up, especially with kids in the house. He’d probably find a list of safety hazards if he inspected the place. He eased his hip around the post. Past the turn, they lowered the couch again and brought it to the place Laurie indicated in the front room, providing an ungainly companion to the chair. Slowly straightening with one hand on his back, Cal found her watching him with a crooked smile. She handed back their drinks, then pulled a twenty from her pocket, gave it to Ray, and thanked him.

Ray beamed, shoving it into his pocket with the closest thing to a gloat Cal ever saw on his face. “I didn’t say I’d pay you.” He waved a finger at him.

“No problem.” That was another one of their little jokes. But it confirmed his earlier thoughts on service. Cal didn’t add that this time seeing Laurie was payment enough. With one step toward her, he blurted, “How about dinner?” He saw the familiar pucker between her eyebrows and wondered what form her rejection would take, but she surprised him.

“I guess I owe you. I can scrounge something together.”

That wasn’t what he’d meant, but if she felt better cooking than going out, who was he to object?

Ray turned at the door. “Sounds great!”

Cal looked at him, slack-jawed. No, he hadn’t a clue, and he didn’t take a hint either.

Laur ie laughed. “Come on, then.” She led the way to the kitchen. “The children are with my mother for the night, so I haven’t planned anything. I have some steaks to thaw if you want to start a fire.”

She spoke over her shoulder, but Cal knew her comment was directed to him. “I put fires
out
, remember?” Seven years ago he had finished his initial training to become a fireman. Did she recall?

She handed him a box of matches and aimed him toward the back door. “Then you should be good at lighting them too.” Now there was logic for you.

On the patio, he found an ancient grill, charcoal, and lighter fluid. Couldn’t she just use gas like the rest of the world? He choked on the black dust that rose when he dumped out the charcoal, then saturated it and took up the matches. He could hear Laurie’s voice and Ray’s jovial answers through the screen. It wouldn’t take her long to realize Ray’s hive was minus a bee or two. But he was harmless overall.

When the briquettes had soaked long enough, Cal held a lit match to the pile. The flame leaped, and instantly his throat tightened and his hand shook as he tossed the match and stepped back. He swore. This was not the time to lose it. He scanned Laurie’s yard, breathing, breathing.
Focus. Don’t think
.